Neelabh Sourav Four Poems
Translated from Assamese by: Bibekananda Choudhury
Curse
I saw a variegated face on your hands
I saw a chequered venomous snake
Eyes bulging
Cheek nose swelled up like the character
in the painting of Van Gogh
Coughing intermittently
I saw an amazing sight on your palms
Magical actor fingers
I got startled on reading
What have you written
How dare you
Making a mincemeat of people
What an astonishing devilish pen I saw
On your hands
Restlessness
Bird flies
So bird is restless
You say
House is stable,
tree is stable
At the last point of your visible limit
There is a wall at that very place
Another behind you
On both left and right
There are two more
At the distance beyond your sight
There
The houses fly
The trees fly
Be stable.
Philosophy
A shirt lay standing on the road
People have gathered forming a crowd
To form a crowd is people’s duty
People have learnt a lot through this act
But it was not the assigned duty
of the shirt that lay standing
The shirt belonged to someone
The crowd of naked people were seeing past and future intermittently
in a sculpted shirt
Yesterday I talked with many
There was a time—you talked to me.
Today is another time—I am talking to you.
There was a time—you had been oblivious
Today is another time—I am oblivious
Wheel rotates thus
Yesterday as I talked I did not feel as before
Because you had been in the West—I in the east
There had been a time you were dissatisfied with something
Today is another time something happened
You like something
I am a fallen tree but old
As you cross you can kick me
But on return you can still talk to me
Yesterday you talked haltingly pondering on between
Because you very well know
You have laid a trap
Without letting the lion or the mouse
To get the scent of it
Cautiously
Pacifying yourself
Yesterday
You taught the rule of
Not the light or the ray
But of darkness
Yesterday you knew
You were vouching against yourself
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